This is Garrison Keillor's contribution to the renga that Vickie Karp created for the "inside thirteen" blog of New York City's PBS outlet, Channel 13. Renga is the name of a Japanese "chain" form in which two or more poets collaborate in haiku or in alternating stanzas, a haiku stanza (three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables) followed by a two-line stanza, each line containing seven syllables.

I was always fascinated, frightened, and powerfully attracted by Russian planes. They were the shiksa aircraft -- and they're still as hot as ever. This is quite a recent plane, the SU-37. There's something both compelling and appalling about this. I suggest watching without the techno music sound.

A reader asks, "What is market timing and why is it bad?" and "What are mutual fund managers buying thse days?"

Conventional wisdom has it that "market timing" -- cashing out your portfolio when you anticipate a downturn, and the reverse -- is a foolish strategy because no one can accurately pinpoint when the market has reached its apex or its bottom. The objection is valid, and you should hold your long-term investments (for retirement, for example) through thick and thin; if history is a guide, stocks trend upward over any period of length. On the other hand, it makes pefect sense to apply financial rule #1 -- buy low, sell high -- when you need to liquidate securities to finance a major purchase, such as a down payment on a house. For more on the perils of market timing, click on the link above to John Bogle's words of wisdom. Bogle founded the Vanguard group and was its CEO for many a long year.

What are the smart guys buying and holding? As of the end of January, Joel Tillinghast, head honcho of Fidelity Low-Priced Stock Fund, had placed bets on Bed Bath & Beyond, Oracle, United Health Group, and the Brazilian oil Goliath, Petrobras. [Source: Semi-Annual Report of January 31, 2008, compared with Annual Report of July 31, 2007.] As the year began, Will Danoff of Fidelity Contrafund had significant positions in Google, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Exxon Mobil, Hewlett-Packard, and Procter & Gamble. [Source: Annual Report of December 31, 2007.]

On April 25, we posted Emily Dickinson's # 1066, a two-line poem that can be construed as the opening of a longer poem. We invited readers to complete the poem. Mitch Sisskind and Rachel's Friend concluded the stanza with exquisite metaphors that Emily would have liked; JL borrows from Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide"; Hg elaborated the two lines into twelve. You choose.

--DL

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never dieAnd are too seldom born ––

– Emily Dickinson

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die And are too seldom born --Their epitaphs -- memorialized --Cut in water -- frozen in stone.

-- Mitch Sisskind

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never dieAnd are too seldom born ––Endure a lone EternityOf longing for the Tomb.

-- Rachel's Friend

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never dieAnd are too seldom born –Better to go down - dignified –where nobody can call you crone -

-- JL

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never dieAnd are too seldom born,Are rare creatures: gold nuggets pannedFrom a river of dirt.

But who wants immortality?A gilded brooch to wearOn a preening cocktail dress breastTwice, thrice a year at most,

A butterfly pinned for show? No,I'll float in the water,Swept downstream with everyone elseTo a last resting place.

I was leafing through the Times, headingfor the sports page because I’ve becomea bit of a Yankee fan though I live inCincinnati, and even in Cincinnati I’maware of the chaos in the housing industry, but all the exigencies and catastrophes hadeluded me until there, eye-poppingly, I read“Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit”! Oh I’ve acted perfectly disgraceful whenit comes to amortization, and the datedue remains for me an approximation butI’ve never actually defaulted on anything, and I’m making progress, I’ve learneddebentures aren’t false teeth, oh I can’timagine closing an entire unit of loaning! Lehman, we love you, keep forking over!

There are some videos I watch every day. I will post one of these each day for the next week in the hope our readers will find them as poetically inspired and inspiring as I do.

Growing up in Chicago I remember one blazing hot summer day walking past a bar and hearing Marty Robbins singing "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" on the jukebox. That was the white country sound favored by Chicago newcomers from Kentucky. As kids on the North Side we weren't too aware of the great black bluesmen in the other part of town who had come up from Mississippi. Junior Kimbrough was one generation younger than those guys -- he died only a few years ago -- and he never left Mississippi for Chicago. His sound was hypnotic reggae-like, so different from virtuosos like Muddy Waters (who preferred to be called by his real name "McKinley.") This is such a great clip, filmed at Junior Kimbrough's roadhouse in north Mississippi. Another great player, RL Burnside, is present enjoying the music. I will post a clip of him soon. All these guys were part of a lineage that was brought to light by Fat Possum records about ten years ago. These amazing and powerful artists are gone now.

It's the order that you put words in, much as a tactician deploys troops
for various effects. (Note: The second syllable of syntax is a clue to its
relationship to the word 'tactics'.)

So what does this syntax business have to do with Molly and the various forms of Bloom (Harold, Joyce, and Bendall)?

Prose writers have it tough (or is that easy?): when James Joyce launches on the final passage of Ulysses or William Faulkner speaks as Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, they create a great deal of drama and energy with evocative, strangely-ordered prose (portraying respectively sexual arousal and the texture of an adult mind with Down Syndrome).

1. The discursive way
(spells, lists, questions, imperatives, fragments—evocative issues of order in utterance)

and

2. The Wallace Stevens way (a carefully-considered issue of arrangement along the line and between the line)

So when Harold Bloom says of Wallace Stevens that ""he's a great master of syntax" and then explains that "enjambment is not an effect of grammar at all, but purely of syntax" he means to point us toward a way to read Wallace Stevens.

"The Poems of our Climate" (a poem about a flower arrangement; "pink and white carnations" in a "brilliant bowl") concludes in a lovely but very strange manner:

The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds

Okay, since my point here is related to word-order, I'm going to scandalously reorder the poem's final stanza for the sake of argument. (I'm also going to split an infinitive.) Are you still with me? I think (presumptuously) the sense of the line reads:

The imperfect is our paradise. And since the imperfect is so hot in us, note that, in this bitterness, delight lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

But between the enjambment of that end-word "delight" and the shifty nature of that front-word "Lies" is a Word Order Shocker (!): a whole phrase inserted between. Hence, delight also crumbles back to its double-existence as pure pleasure and Lies stands up on its own, seeming to merely dissemble. This issue of placement (syntax) then subverts and expands the potential literal sense (grammar).

Emily D. shares with Papa Hemingway title of "Most Famous Most Misunderstood American Writer."

Please read Joyce Carol Oates' new book "Wild Nights!" for brilliant portraits of Papa and The Little Wren.

A few of Emily's personae: vampire, volcano, Bo Peep girl. Could do both Innocence and Experience. I love her as Bo Peep.

Greatest lyricist of autoeroticism.

Many secret messages in her poems.

Kept herself in the house -- scared of what she might do if she got out.

Father bought her Newfoundland dog (Carlo) so she would go outside to walk him. When Carlo died, stopped going out.

Really turned on by the Civil War!

Brokered affair between her brother Austin (married to E's domme nemesis Susan. Or was E the domme?) and artsy hippie chick Amherst faculty wife Mabel Loomis Todd. It was Mabel who published Emily's poems and got the only known photo of her doctored with "angelic" hairdo, ruff, etc. -- as seen in DL's post below.

E never met with Mabel face to face but stood outside drawing room while Mabel played piano.

Maybe E had a whole photo collection of herself that will someday be found. Here's hoping!

While this can be read as a complete work, you may argue that it represents the beginning of a poem that Dickinson intended to finish but never did. You now have the chance to add lines to the poem -- as few as two as many as ten -- to bring it to completion. What do you write?

April 24, 2008

KENNING: a compound word or phrase similar to an epithet, but which involves a multi-noun replacement for a single noun, such as wave traveler for boat or whale-path for ocean, used especially in Old English, Old Norse and early Teutonic poetry. A type of periphrasis, some kennings are instances of metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche

SYLLEPSIS (suh-LEP-sus): a type of zeugma in which a single word, usually a verb or adjective, agrees grammatically with two or more other words, but semantically with only one, thereby effecting a shift in sense with the other, as in "colder than ice and a usurer's heart," or Pope's: "Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade."

Despite a wretched week, Lehman battled back with negative ads about his opponent. . . Lehman’s sister Sue won the Sydney marathon. Cries of “Sue Lehman!” filled the air. . . An actor wearing a Warren Buffett mask called Lehman “a ticking time-bomb” that would go off when, in spite of all the avant-garde accounting methods in use, the bad debt and derivatives will have to be written down. The argument elicited the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves and even a smile or two from the nervous nabobs of negativity. "Death is the down side of Capitalism," Lehman explained to the hushed crowd. "But we have a right to dream."

After the bell earnings came in as expected. The dividend would not have to be lowered after all. Lehman mixed martinis for the relieved shareholders. "The profit margins at the venerable house may shrink,” he quipped. “But the prophets themselves have never had it so good. They are being feted in a manner that the Bible’s Amos and Joel and Hosea could not have imagined or foretold." Lunch hour had begun. Ladies loped on the sidewalk in front of headquarters. A bespectacled lad recited numbers into his cell phone. Meanwhile, the search for Lehman’s missing brother remained the three-hundred-pound Republican in the room.

No one but you she says she swore.
Why one night a god threw open the door.
I loved you more.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River.
River river river river river river river

from Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

Thank goodness women started writing! While the Jacobeans (mostly men) took this issue of women’s vows particularly seriously, current country artists such as woman-crooner Terri Clark seem more inclined to look askance at the honesty of young men like, say, Catullus.

Johnny Podres, who died on January 13, 2008, has just shut out the New York Yankees in game seven of the 1955 World Series -- and the Brooklyn Dodgers have won the world championship for the first time. It is October 4, 1955. It is 3:43 in the afternoon.

Quiz: What is the title of the poem composed by ardent Dodger fan Marianne Moore in tribute to the 1955 Dodgers?